image International Conference on Social Media and Communication Technologies December, Amsterdam, Netherlands

We Are Museums 2018, ESAV Marrakech, Morocco, Caravan Archive of stories

For our 6th edition of We Are Museums conference, we have decided to let ourselves inspired by a country and a culture based on the intangible to inspire new models of museums. We have travelled to Marrakech in Morocco to host our first conference outside of the European continent. Adjusted to the location, WAM 2018 gathered experts and professionals from national and international museums to explore trends in the museum development that are making a global impact.

We focus on a social context in flux – namely, the ongoing financial crisis in Greece – where a radical redefinition of values, needs and lifestyles occurs. Rising unemployment, poverty, deprivation and social inequality are having direct effect on relationships with the self and others as well as the collective definitions of culture and society. In a context like this, individuals and groups enact and modify existing narratives, try to create new meanings, ante-narratives and meta-narratives in the living moment. Through character-based, short documentaries, The Caravan gathers and diffuses everyday life stories that have the power to unsettle relations and interactions, and co-construct spaces of collective reflection and transformative social experiences. These spaces of transformation give voice to the marginalized, often voiceless communities that persistently remain underrepresented in recent accounts of the financial crisis. Thus, in situations of acute change, we are wondering: how can the impulse of telling untold stories be enhanced? How can we create new spaces, or transform spaces so they can maintain their potential to elicit untold stories?

How do stories become territorialized, de-territorialised and re-territorialized through their performance and re-construction in diverse social contexts? How can untold stories been accessed and re-embedded in a collectively created new social fabric that facilitates institutional entrepreneurship? How stories which remain largely untold obtain legitimacy and new audiences when integrated in social, collectively constructed platforms and differentially embedded social entrepreneurial projects? Our work presented in this storytelling seminar will address these questions by presenting The Caravan Project, a travelogue in crisis-stricken Greece aiming at bringing untold stories into the foreground while focusing on the richness and diversity of human narration. 

Our objectives: 

1) Embed The Caravan Project into educational and other social/community-based platforms; links with educational institutions, new educational agents, social entrepreneurs and creative initiatives. 

2) Contribute to the re-construction of existing institutional structures (e.g. educational, artistic and so on) and relationships and provide the social space for the emergence of new ones. 

3) Contribute to the development of a cultural context where the Commons can access the tools to re-appreciate the power of storytelling, re-evaluate our relationship with mythologies as identity construction processes and contribute to the re-construction of a collective consciousness.